Petra Bernardini

Growing syntactic structure and code-mixing in the weaker language: The Ivy Hypothesis

We present a hypothesis for a specific kind of code-mixing in young bilingual children, during the development of their two first languages, one of which is considerably weaker than the other. Our hypothesis, which we label the Ivy Hypothesis, is that, in the interaction meant to be in the weaker language, the child uses portions of higher syntactic structure lexically instantiated in the stronger language combined with lower portions in the weaker language. Code-mixing patterns were studied in five Swedish-French/Italian children aged 2-4. The parts of the code-mixed utterances reflected as much syntactic structure of each language as was used in monolingual utterances in the same recording of each child. This uneven development, which is due to different amounts of input of the two languages, can be accounted for by assuming that syntactic structure is acquired by building each language from the bottom up through lexical learning. (Less)

Weak interest in the weaker language

Carrolls paper (Carroll) is most welcomed and shows that the weaker language is still to be explored from various points of views. Over twenty years after the publication of Schlyters paper, “The weaker language in bilingual Swedish-French children”, not only is the topic of the weaker language of simultaneous bilinguals still a clearly under-researched area, but it is also, as Carroll shows, a crucial domain of research in the discussion of properties and constraints of the human Language Making Capacity (LMC).

Determiner use in Italian Swedish and Italian German children: Do Swedish and German represent the same parameter setting?

In this article we compare the acquisition of determiners in bilingual children acquiring Italian simultaneously with German or Swedish. We are concerned with cross-linguistic differences in the rate of acquisition and we discuss in particular the Nominal Mapping Parameter, a model according to which the syntax-semantics interface is crucial in acquisition and which predicts similar developmental patterns for children acquiring a Germanic language. We show that Swedish determiners are acquired more easily than German determiners, which implies that predictions for developmental patterns should not be based on syntactic factors alone, but must make reference to typological differences in morphology and phonology. Furthermore, we show that the acquisition of Italian determiners is affected positively by the simultaneous acquisition of Swedish but that no such effect arises when Italian is acquired simultaneously with German.